GREENWOOD, S.C. (AP) - Racial tensions right now are troubling to Cynthia M. Gary, a physician assistant who lives in North Carolina. She grew up in Greenwood and graduated from Greenwood High School.
Gary, 46, has a hopeful story about race relations that has been published in two of the more than 350 different “Chicken Soup for the Soul” book titles. Her story, “The Other Bus Story,” appears in “Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Magic of Moms” published in March 2020. The story was first published in 2017 in “Chicken Soup for the Soul: My Kind (of) America.” It tells the story of an incident in Cynthia’s mother’s life when she was a child. The story also was featured in a podcast.
Press materials from Chicken Soup for the Soul public relations contacts sums up Gary’s story this way: Gary takes comfort in remembering that her mother, an African American child in the segregated South of the 1950s, was welcomed to the front of the bus by her white neighbors.
The inspirational “Chicken Soup for the Soul” book series has hundreds of titles and has been translated into several languages, and has expanded beyond the bookshelf with product lines, television shows, podcasts and even an app.
“It’s a positive story,” Gary told the Index-Journal in a phone interview. “My mom told me about growing up during segregation, but I feel like growing up, she never felt like everyone was a horrible person. … She told me about getting on the bus with her mother and instead of going to the back, my mother just stopped up front. She told her mother, ‘No, I’m not going back there because I can’t see anything.’ She told me she just plopped down, right beside a white lady sitting up front. The white lady said it was fine and agreed with her that you could see more up front.”
Gary said she received notice from “Chicken Soup for the Soul” publishers that they wanted to republish the story this year, in a book for Mother’s Day.
“With everything going on right now, I think it’s good to get the word out about the story,” Gary said. “It can be stressful keeping up with current events right now. It seems like the world is on fire … but there are pockets where that is not the case … What’s happening in your everyday life is what you have to remember. For the most part, the vast majority of people just want to live their lives.”
Change is happening, Gary said, noting Confederate monuments in North Carolina’s capitol have come down in recent weeks.
“You have to think about context,” Gary said. “Why were statues up in the first place? Why are they down now? The biggest thing for me is remembering that we can go from place to place peacefully and no one is preventing me today from sitting where I want to sit, getting an education or going to work.”
Gary’s mother, Mary Arnita Fisher Gary, who shared the account of refusing to ride at the back of the bus, died in 2018.
“My mom was always the type to tell stories about growing up,” Gary said. “There were seven siblings in her family altogether. She was born in the 1940s, near the Epworth community and she was a relative of Benjamin E. Mays.”
Mays, also of Epworth, was a Baptist minister, civil rights leader and president of Morehouse College. He is regarded as a spiritual mentor of Martin Luther King Jr. and was an adviser to three U.S. presidents. Mays was a son of parents born into slavery. The Dr. Benjamin E. Mays Historical Preservation Site in Greenwood is on North Hospital Street.
Gary said she’s been into journaling most of her life and has had poetry published in addition to the bus story her mom told her.
“I mainly write for myself,” she said. “I’m motivated by a lot of things my mom told me. She was a good storyteller and she made sure we understood we were Black and about Black history, but not in a way where we were bitter or hateful toward other people. She said every white person didn’t treat her badly … I try to think about how I am I treated every day and how I treat everyone else. It’s good to protest and be vocal about change, as long as it’s done in a decent way … I just believe in having conversations with people.”
Gary said her mother’s bus story has shaped her and reminds her that whether it’s on a segregated bus in South Carolina during the 1950s, or now, many people are “focused on doing the right thing.”
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